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Showing posts with label Black racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Black racism. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 17, 2021

CRITICAL RACE THEORY: A RACIST IDEA TO OPPRESS WHITES

 Critical Race Theory contends that Blacks cannot be racists, by definition.  History indicates that not only can they be racists, they can be fascists.  I shall add more to this post soon.


Anthony G. Flood, "From Garvey to Farrakhan"

On August 13, 1920 Marcus Garvey presided at the convention of the United Negro Improvement Association held at Madison Square Garden in New York City. There he promulgated the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World. Its 54 points comprise the farthest thing from a fascist manifesto.

And yet, as my friend Hugh Murray noted a quarter-century ago, Garvey “admired . . . leading anti-communists, such as Mussolini. Indeed, in 1937 Garvey proudly proclaimed of his Universal Negro Improvement Association, ‘We were the first fascists.’[1]

Here’s the full quote:

We were the first Fascists, when we had 100,000 disciplined men, and were training children, Mussolini was still an unknown. Mussolini copied our Fascism.[2]

He said this in 1937, after Mussolini consolidated his rape of Ethiopia.

While many liberals [Murray continues] are the first to hurl the word “fascist” at those with whom they disagree, they usually ignore the fascism of blacks, even when publicly advocated.[3]

A few years after Hugh wrote those words, King’s College Professor of American and English Literature Paul Gilroy came out with “Black Fascism” (Transition, Indiana UPress, 2000, 70-91), a scholarly monograph on Garvey’s boast, the first instance of Black public advocacy of fascism. I recommend it to students of this overlooked chapter of Black American history.

George Lincoln Rockwell, center

On June 25, 1961 American Nazi Party Commander George Lincoln Rockwell sat in the Uline Arena, Washington, DC (where the Beatles would give their first US concert a few years later). He was there at the invitation of Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Elijah Muhammad. Thousands were in attendance. During the collection, Rockwell shouted:

George Lincoln Rockwell gives $20!

That’s about $135 in today’s money. Malcolm X, noting the applause, asked him:

George Lincoln Rockwell, you got the biggest hand you ever got, didn’t you? [4]

This wasn’t a one-off: Muhammad invited Rockwell to speak at their next Saviour’s Day Convention, which he did on Sunday, February 25, 1962, before 12,175 people in Chicago’s International Amphitheater.

At the podium, in full Nazi regalia, Rockwell adjudged “that Elijah Muhammad is to the so-called Negro what Adolph Hitler is to the German people. He is the most powerful black man in the country.  Heil Hitler!” [5]

Louis Farrakhan, NOI’s current Führer, has not only not repudiated his outfit’s past overtures to American Nazis, but has only reinforced his image as a Black National Socialist. Of course, there isn’t an American Nazi Party worth its salt to invite to a Saviours’ Day commemoration. (Farrakhan pluralized “Saviour” in 1983.) Instead he enjoys the admiration of Black Muslim members of Congress who share his anti-Jewish Weltanschauung and can promote it on a platform wider than the Uline Arena.

Whereas Farrakhan recently joked that he’s not an anti-Semite (only “anti-termite“) it’s the considered view of Ilhan Omar (D-MN) that “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.” When, under pressure from the Democratic leadership, she apologized, Farrakhan gently chided her:

Ms. Omar from Somalia—she started talking about ‘the Benjamins’ and they are trying to make her apologize. Sweetheart, don’t do that. Pardon me for calling you sweetheart, but you do have a sweet heart. You sure are using it to shake the government up, but you have nothing to apologize for. . . . Israel and AIPAC pays off senators and congressmen to do their bidding, so you’re not lying, so if you’re not lying. Stop laying down. You were sent there by the people to shake up that corrupt House.

Another Muslim congressional newbie, a 2006 guest columnist for NOI’s The Final Call, is Rashida “Impeach the motherf—–” Tlaib (D-MN). She wants the US to cut off aid to Israel because such aid “doesn’t fit the values of our country,” which “values” apparently include using an obscenity to refer to our country’s president. In front of her child.

Addressing both women, the Minister reminded his “beautiful sisters” that they “were sent there to shake that House up. Your people voted you in, but God is the overseer.”

Image result for farrakhan obama
Then-Senator Obama with Farrakhan and members of the Congressional Black Caucus, 2005

America’s most notable Black Muslims, Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, fell out with the NOI: Malcolm in 1964, Ali in 1975.[6] Farrakhan, perhaps the lone survivor of that generation, remains Farrakhan. His 1984 description of “Adolf Hitler [as] a very great man” didn’t socially restrict him from appearing in a photo op with one president or sharing the stage with another.

He was almost certainly at those “ecumenical” NOI events in 1961 and 1962. I would appreciate hearing from any reader who can eliminate the “almost.”

Image result for farrakhan clinton
Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Bill Clinton, funeral service for Aretha Franklin, Greater Grace Temple, Detroit, MI, Aug. 31, 2018

[1] See J. A. Rogers, World’s Great Men of Color (New York: J. A. Rogers, 1947), Vol. II, pp. 602, 605.”

[2] 1937 interview reported by Joel A. Rogers, “Marcus Garvey,” in Negroes of New York series, New York Writers Program, 1939, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York. This remark seems to have been dropped from later editions of Rogers’s book.

[3] See Murray’s “White Liberals, Black Racists,” in Chronicles (August, 1994), pp. 43-46.

[4] Muhammad Speaks, April 1962, p. 3.

[5] See Black History and the Class StruggleSpartacist League, August 1994, p. 37. Those interested in researching this fascinating (if also disturbing) chapter of American history should start with William H. Schmaltz, Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell & the American Nazi Party, Washington,DC: Brassey’s, 1999. For the June 25, 1961 event, see Chapter 6, “1961: This Time the World,” 119-21; for February 25, 1962, see Chapter 7, “1962: A World Union of National Socialists,” 133-35. I’ve posted the text of these chapters here. See also Tristan Hopper, “The weird time Nazis made common cause with black nationalists,” National Post, August 24, 2017. Also useful is Mark Jones, “Malcolm X’s Unlikely Washington Connections,” Boundary Stones, February 21, 2015.  The most comprehensive article I’ve seen is Sam McPheeters, “When Malcolm X Met the Nazis,” Vice, April 15, 2015. See also Hugh Murray’s 1994 letter to The New York Times and 1995 letter to The Chronicles of Higher Education. You can read them here.

[6] It probably got Malcolm killed. After he had called out Elijah Muhammad for serially impregnating his underage secretaries, Farrakhan (then “Louis X”) announced that “such a man is worthy of death.” He later regretted that his words may have led to Malcolm’s murder on February 25, 1965—two months after he uttered them.

 

Friday, July 8, 2016

KILLING POLICE IN DALLAS - BLACK RACISM

     At a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas, Texas, shots rang out.  Soon, police officers were falling.  A sniper was targeting white police officers, killing 5, wounding several others.
     Before one sniper (there may have been others) was killed by authorities, he told police he was angry, he wanted to kill whites, he wanted to kill white police officers.  And he did so.
     Pres. Obama gave a short speech in Europe, his Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch gave a speech in the US, and various political figures decried the incident.
    BUT SOMETHING IMPORTANT WAS MISSING.  The Obama Administration refused to label Islamic terrorism as Islamic terrorism, even when the Orlando murderer of 49 pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and praised Allah while killing innocent Americans.  Obama, with a father and a step father who were Muslims will not condemn radical Islamic terrorism.  And that is the policy of his Administration.  Republicans do identify jihadist murderers as Islamic terrorists.
    While the sniper in Dallas revealed his hatred for whites and police, while he acknowledged his desire to kill whites and white police - and while this is clearly a racist statement - major politicians refuse to call the killings an example of Black racism.  Obama, who is basically a Black racist himself and sat for 20 years in the pew of a church where the pastor preached against whites, is not about to call out Black racism.  Nor will other Democrats, for over 90% of the Black vote goes for Democratic candidates.  But Republicans also avoid the phrase, Black racism.  Many liberal Republicans, working under the illusion that they can somehow gain the Black vote, will say nothing to offend Blacks.  They will not dare speak of "Black racism.:  And the academedia complex - it is complicit in the great lie.  They pretend that Blacks cannot be racists.  Because Blacks lack the power, by definition they cannot be racists.  A president, an attorney general, mayors all over the country, etc., but the pretence continues, Blacks have no power, so, by definition, they cannot be racists.
     Of course, Black criminals show their power when they rob, mug, beat, and kill whites.  Where crime is interracial, it is overwhelmingly Black perpetrator, white victim.  Blacks invade shopping malls, convenience stores, robbing and beating, and nothing happens.  Lately, they hijack autos, and if they are young enough, nothing happens.  Read Flaherty's books like White Girl Bleed a Lot.
      Black racism exists; it can be violent; it can be deadly.  But neither Democrats not Republicans dare even utter the phrase, BLACK RACISM.
      The young white murderer who entered a Black church and killed several at a worship service was a white racist and a murderer.  Because there were photos of him with the Confederate flag,  the Republican SC Gov. removed the historic flag and went to war against that symbol of a past war.  On the net, Black racist sites advocating killing whites show the Black liberation flag, black, red, and green.  Does anyone urge the removal of this flag as racist and a symbol that might inspire murders?
     BLACK LIVES MAY MATTER, BUT BLACK RACISM MATTERS MORE.
    Hugh Murray

Sunday, May 3, 2015

BLACK RACIST LOOTING MOBS IN BALTIMORE

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan held a press conference after Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake announced the 10 pm curfew on the city has been lifted.
The curfew had been set after much of the the city was burned and destroyed during riots last week protesting the death of Freddie Gray, who died while in police custody last month.
Hogan said more than 200 businesses were destroyed – many of which did not have insurance – and that millions of dollars have been lost.
Members of three Baltimore street gangs came together in unity during Monday’s riots to protect businesses — or at least some of them.
Gang members from the Crips, Bloods and Black Guerrilla Family stood guard and protected black-owned businesses from looters and protestors in Baltimore during the riots. The gang members directed the looters instead to other businesses mostly owned by Asians and Arabs, The New York Times reported....

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

BLACK RACISTS ATTACK MAIM & KILL WHITES - LIBERAL MEDIA SILENT

     If you live outside the US or if you live inside the US and your main  source of news is NBC, CNN, CBS, the New York Times, etc., you probably think that America is a racist nation, with white racists brutalizing and killing poor, innocent Blacks.  Note the nation-wide publicity surrounding the incident in which Hispanic George Zimmerman shot the Black teen Trayvon Martin.  Even though Martin had attacked Zimmerman, even though he had a bad rep and police had found what appeared to be stolen jewelry and burglary tools in his possession, the liberal media made Zimmerman, who was trying to defend his neighborhood from hoods, thieves, and burglars, into a monster.  Unfortunately, there ARE monsters in America - but they receive no national attention in the liberal media.  The NYT almost ignored the 2 stories below, even though both occurred in New York.  The liberal media lies, creating the impression that whites are racist, when in reality, more Blacks are racist, violently racist, and express their racism in attacks against whites, and sometimes Asians.  Below are stories that are more typical of violence in America.  They occur weekly, if not daily, in cities throughout the nation.  But they are usually reported, if at all, only in local newspapers and locaL TV news shows.  The national media, the liberal media, pretend these incident do not exist.  Then they promote the story of the young thug Trayvon Martin.---Hugh Murray


National Media Completely Ignore NY Man Left Brain Dead By Attacker Shouting 'I Hate White People'
By Noel Sheppard | September 8, 2013 | 11:07
 98  67 Reddit0  13
A  A

NewsBusters asked Saturday if the media will report a New York man becoming brain dead as a result of an unprovoked attacked by a man saying "I hate white people."
So far with the exception of local New York coverage, the answer is a resounding "No."
Analyses of Google News, LexisNexis, and closed-caption transcripts found absolutely no national reporting of Jeffrey Babbitt, the 62-year-old retired train conductor now in a coma at Bellevue Hospital.
Not one word on ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, or NBC.
Potentially even more curious, the largest newspaper in New York, the New York Times, appears to have not reported this attack despite it occurring in its own backyard.
If Babbitt were black, and his assailant shouted "I hate black people" before inflicting what appears will be a death blow, would America's media be so disinterested?
Or would this be headline news much like what we saw with Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman?
Sadly, we all know the answer as our media have once again shown that they are only interested in white on black hate crimes.
The other variety just don't fit the agenda.
*****Update: It turns out the New York Times did report this matter at its website Friday and in print Saturday. Unfortunately, the name of the assailant was wrong and the article didn't include Babbitt's. That's why it appeared this event had gone unreported.
Readers are advised the errant report was a total of 152 words buried on page 21.
I guess that's the importance the Times gives to black on white hate crimes.
About the Author
Noel Sheppard is the Associate Editor of NewsBusters. Click here to follow Noel Sheppard on Twitter.
Got this through Drudge, from Newsbusters

UPDATE - THE MAN WHO WAS BRAIN DEAD, HAS NOW BEEN RULED DEAD.  MURDERED BY A RACIST BLACK.---HM
……………..
The M60 bus
An attacker pummeled a bus passenger so hard he smashed the bones in his face after calling the victim a “cracker” in Manhattan – marking the second time in two days that people appeared to be randomly targeted in racial tirades against white people, authorities said.
In the latest incident, the suspect passed a 31-year-old rider on the M60 bus riding through Harlem, on West 127th Street, between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive, around 2:45 p.m., Friday, when he shouted the racial slur and punched the victim in the face, breaking his nose and eye socket, cops said.

The victim was treated for facial fractures at New York Presbyterian Hospital and released, police said.
The incident occurred as authorities reported that Jeffrey Babbitt, 62, fell into a coma after being punched and knocked to the ground in Union Square Park on Wednesday. He was taken off life support and died Monday, sources said.
In that case, a 31-year-old allegedly yelled that he was going to “f— up” the next white person he saw, before clocking Babbitt so hard that witnesses reported hearing his skull crack on the pavement.
Two people who tried to help the victim were also punched but refused medical attention at the scene, law enforcement sources said.
The assailant waited for police to arrest him and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said the assault was being investigated as a hate crime.

The suspect in the Harlem attack is 5-foot-11, 185 pounds and is believed to be in his late 30s.

Saturday, August 31, 2013

BLACK ON WHITE CRIME - THESE HORRORS RARELY REPORTED

I took this from Frontpage.com, the site of David Horowitz.  The following is a list of atrocities. The details are not given, for you would have to google for the truly horrible details.  The national media in the US simply refuse to tell the truth about the horrors of Black racism, and its consequences - the beating and killing of numerous white (and even Asian) Americans simply because racist Blacks are in a bad mood, or bored, or some other lame excuse.  We need the death penalty for the racist murderers - most of which are Black!----Hugh Murray

Black-on-White Violence: The Forgotten Victims


victimsAs the nation remembers Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, it should also note that while the self-appointed guardians of King’s legacy, the “anti-racists,” obsess over Paula Deen and liken Trayvon Martin to Emmet Till, they say nothingabout interracial violence when it involves black perpetrators andwhite victims.
Below is a select list of interracial atrocities committed by blacks against whites.  These forgotten victims are men and women, young and old.
Brad Heyka, Jason Befort, Aaron Sander, Heather Muller, “H.G.”: In December of 2000, in Wichita, Kansas, over the course of hours, two brothers, Reginald and Jonathan Carr, robbed, beat, sexually tormented, and repeatedly raped three men and two women. They eventually shot all five victims, execution-style, in the backs of their heads before driving over their bodies with one of the victim’s pick-up truck.  “H.G.” survived. Wearing nothing but a shirt, shot and battered, she walked a mile until she found help.
Channon Christian, Christopher Newsom: In 2007, this young couple was carjacked in Knoxville, Tennessee by four men and one woman.  Both were raped—Newsom anally, Christian anally, vaginally, and orally.  The former was shot and his body set on fire. The latter was suffocated over a span of hours inside of garbage bags—after she was forced to ingest bleach so as to remove traces of her assailants’ DNA.
Sherry West, Antonio Santiago: On March 21 of this year, this woman and her 13 month-old baby son were both shot while going for a walk in their Brunswick, Georgia neighborhood. The mother survived the bullets to her ear and leg.  Little Antonio, however, died instantly when the bullet entered his face.
Joshua Heath Chellew: At the end of June, this 36 year-old man was attacked by four teenagers at a gas station outside of Atlanta, Georgia. In trying to escape the beating that he was suffering, Chellew was fatally struck by a passing car.
Jonathan Foster: On Christmas Eve, 2010, 12 year-old, Jonathan Foster was abducted from his home in Houston, Texas by a 44 year-old woman, Mona Nelson.  The latter bound Foster and then murdered him with a blowtorch.  She discarded his body in a ditch along the road where it was found four days later.  Foster’s remains were so badly charred that his corpse had to be identified by his dental records.
Delbert “Shorty” Benton:  Just last week, the 89 year-old veteran of World War II was beaten to death by two teenagers armed with flashlights. Benton was making his way through the parking lot of one of the places that he regularly frequented when he was attacked.
Chris Lane: The 23 year-old Australian was in the States visiting his girlfriend. While on a run, some reportedly “bored” teenagers shot him in the back.  Lane died shortly afterward.  The thugs had a history of expressing hostility toward whites, and at least one of them was said by police to have laughed and danced upon being arrested.
Fannie Gumbinger: This 99 year-old Poughkeepsie, New York woman died last week when a 20 year-old burglar murdered her in her home.  Police say she suffered “multiple injuries.”

There is no shortage of people who will defend the deafening silence of the “anti-racists” with respect to these interracial horrors on the grounds that, supposedly, they had nothing to do with color.  Black criminals seek out whites, it is often said, simply because whites are perceived as having more in the way of material goods.
Yet if this is true, then color or race most certainly does have something to do with these attacks: black criminalsprofile whites.  But if there is nothing illegitimate about black predators (or others) profiling whites as “privileged,” “advantaged,” “racist,” etc., then neither can it be said—as it is always said by “anti-racists”—that there is anything illegitimate about whites profiling blacks.
Only hypocrisy, illogic, or some combination of the two could make one suggest otherwise.
Another common criticism centers on the alleged irrelevance of the race of perpetrators and victims. After all, it is the murder that should be condemned; the color of murderer and murdered of no consequence.
Ah. So, if this is the case, then “racism” should never come under attack at all, for it isn’t, say, the color of the Klansmen and the black victims that they lynched that is blameworthy, but the lynching itself.
There isn’t a single “anti-racist” who would dream to reason thus.
One reason that black-on-white violence should be discussed is that it is both ubiquitous and evil.  The blacks responsible for it constitute but a tiny percentage of the national population, and yet they are several times more likely than their white counterparts to engage in interracial violence.
Another reason that black-on-white cruelty must be brought out into the open is that it is a reality that can only weaken the false narrative of unrelenting White Oppression and perpetual Black Suffering that has been used by demagogues and opportunists to prop up the destructive policies that they’ve promoted in the name of combating “racism.”

Saturday, July 20, 2013

OBAMOPPRESSION! - TRAYVON MARTIN AGAIN

     President Obama got into the Zimmerman case again now claiming 35 years ago, he could have been Trayvon.  He has been followed in stores, etc., presumably by owners or security thinking he might be stealing something.  What Obama, Sharpton, and the other radical Black Nationalists want is the right of every Black to steal from those of other races.  Implicit in their world view is that Blacks are the victims of theft.  They did not elect to come to this country, they were kidnapped, enslaved, and forced to work for the wealth of whitey.  Now is pay back.
    The slaves imported were most often bought in Africa from Black African slave traders.  They were already slaves.  And in North America, the slaves were probably treated better than slaves who had remained in Africa.  And in the US, slavery ended.  It came at a price.  More Americans died in the Civil War, the war that would end slavery, than in most of all the American wars added together.  White blood paid for the freedom of the Blacks in the US.  (Yes, Blacks fought too, but without the whites, there would have been no freedom for the Blacks.)  Despite oppression and discrimination, American Blacks rose to be the wealthiest group of Blacks in the world.  By contrast, in parts of Africa today, there is slavery, starvation, and savagery.  The Blacks who were taken to North America experience wealth far higher than for most Africans who remained on their home continent.  AND many Blacks have chosen to come to the US!  They elected to do so because they are aware of how much better it is for them here than in their homelands.
     But Obama and the Left thinks that Blacks in the US are poor.  The wealthy are all white, especially white men.  If a Black teen wants to rob the white, the white should not resist.  Give up the money.  It was probably stolen by your ancestors anyway.  You did nothing to earn it.  Whites stole.  Give it up to the Black teen!  Do not resist.  Do not stand your ground.  Give to the hoodie, and hope he does not beat the shit our of you or kill you.  You deserve this because of your ancestors.  Pay back.  Tell the police, and they might get around to doing something about it.  But police do have higher priorities - investigating the latest hate crime hoax, etc.  If your home is burglarized by a Black teen, do nothing.  Call the police later.  File a report.
    The police already picked up the angelic Trayvon Martin, found him with jewelry stolen from a home not far, and he was carrying burglary tools.  But the police did not arrest Trayvon.  NO.  Trayvon is Black.  The police did not want to raise their stats of arrested young Black men.  That might cause trouble with the hate-whitey Dept. of Justice led by Eric Holder under Pres. Obama.  So they merely had Trayvon suspended from public school.  Police must pretend that Blacks are not involved in crime more than their percentage of the population.  If the Blacks as a group are more engaged in crime, and arrested, that means that the police are racist, according to the Left, and Holder, and Obama.  Black crime is not real; it is merely taking back.  Arresting Blacks for that is simply racist.  Standing you ground is racist.  Zimmerman is racist.  If a white - or even an Hispanic dares to say no to a Black thug, like Trayvon, he is a racist, and deserves to have his nose broken and head bashed.
    In Obama's world, Black criminals are not criminals.  They are just innocents taking back what was stolen from them hundreds of years ago.  In Obama's world, whites and Hispanics who try to protect their lives, their property, or their sacred honor, are the real criminals, the real villains, the real enemies.  They do not want to give up their property to the oppressed minority.  If they defend themselves, they must be prosecuted on flimsy evidence.  If found not guilty, they must be persecuted by the media and Eric Holder's Justice Department.  Those who try to protect themselves from young Black crooks must be destroyed.  That is the new order.
    Of course, there are honest Blacks who do not seek to rob their neighbors.  But the ideology of the Left, of Obama, has been to encourage Black racism, Black rage, Black criminality.
   It is the era of Obamoppression!  We must ignore the Black racist President.  We must stand our ground.  We must demand that police stop the Black racist mobs that roam in the summer streets of major cities.  We must restore the death penalty; real prison sentences for violent crime; we must demand real stats on crime (no more calling Hispanics white when they are perps, and classifying them as Hispanics when they are victims.)  Whites are the main victims of the crime wave that has swept America since the 1960s.  It has only grown worse under Obamoppression.
   Obama is a Black racist.  There was a reason he marched beside the leaders of the New Black Panther Party in Selma around 2007.  There was a reason his Administration dropped charges against the NBPP when it openly intimidated voters in Philadelphia in Nov. 2008.  There is a reason when Obama identifies himself with the thug Trayvon Martin and, in effect, encourages more racist mobs in the street.
          hUGH mURRAY  See my earlier piece on the Zimmerman Show Trial, for more on this case.
         HUGH MURRAY

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Reporting the War against White People


            
“WHITE GIRL BLEED A LOT”: THE RETURN OF RACE RIOTS
TO AMERICA (Book International D, 2nd ed., March 2012, paperback)
By COLIN FLAHERTY
Rev. by Hugh Murray
            The book is simply a series of reports of Black flash mobs crashing into stores, grabbing, insulting, robbing, beating, and occasionally sending whites to hospital or to the morgue.  On one level, this book is quite boring, for it is the same story told and retold again.  It is the same story in Philadelphia, San Francisco, New York, Miami, Myrtle Beach, Indianapolis, Charlotte, Texas, New Jersey, Milwaukee, etc.  The stories are variations on the same theme, how can young Blacks humiliate whites, destroy their property, steal, beat, and then run away.  Black racism, Black on white hatred, Black on white crime, Black on white violence is an epidemic in America.  This part of Flaherty’s book is solid.
            Unfortunately, the response to these crimes is usually as repetitious as the crimes themselves.  Local newspapers generally refuse to identify the race of the perpetrators.  The author is able to do so by using Youtube videos, often posted by the criminals.  They are proud of their violent crimes against whites (sometimes, against Asians).  One amazon reviewer dismissed the content of the book, maintaining it was anecdotal and not accord with the FBI’s hate crime statistics.  In Milwaukee on July 3, 2011, a groups of Blacks ransacked a gas station’s convenience store.  They then rampaged in a nearby park beating and stealing from whites, who were there to view the fireworks.  Police were called and came to the scene.  However, because of the politically correct sensitivity to minorities, even sensitive to those engaging in crime, the officers refused to file reports of the crimes.  If there are no police reports of the Blacks attacking whites, then the crimes do not exist, and these crimes are not included in FBI or any other statistics.  Does one expect the Eric Holder Justice Department (the one that dropped the voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party) to investigate possible anti-white racism in a police department that permitted them to ignore the violent crimes by Blacks against whites?  Only after some of the whites were treated at hospital and called talk radio did local TV reports begin to expose the Black racist assaults.  Finally, [white] Police Chief Ed Flynn conceded that some “fights” had occurred.  Flaherty snidely commented, “’fights,’ which is a curious way to describe a race riot where some of the victims actually tried to defend themselves.”(p. 120)   One of the white gals was slugged so hard, that her blood evoked the comment that inspired the title of this book.  Mayor Tom Barrett, a liberal Democrat, and Chief Flynn, an import from New York, denied these were hate crimes, assured the city that crime was colorblind, and decried those who sought to “sensationalize” the occurrences. 
            Flaherty has amassed a book of crimes – crimes by Blacks against whites, and a few of Blacks against Asians.  Flaherty recounts page after page of Black on white hostility, insults, theft, beatings, some of which may have led to emergency treatment, and sometimes to the grave.  Page after page.  Boring to read; painful to read, distressing to read of such injustice perpetrated so often by violent, Black racists, depressing to read how the crimes are not reported in the press, or not reported as racist crimes.
            Josef Stalin, the Soviet dictator, observed that the death of one person is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic.
            Unfortunately, in the US it becomes harder to acquire accurate statistics of Black on White crime.  If you simply read the local newspaper accounts of most of these incidents, all of the racial animosity and motivation is removed, deleted, expunged, censored.  Why are Americans not supposed to read about the massive hatred and violence against whites committed by Blacks?
            Black mobs are not identified as such; they are roving groups of “youths,” “teens,” “young people,” indulging in unseemly behavior.  These are not hate crimes, and race has little or nothing to do with it.  Of course, the reality is NOT what is reported.  The reality is that young Blacks engage in insulting, threatening, beating, and robbing whites.  But the major media do NOT want to reveal this basic fact.  Flaherty finds the facts – on Youtube, where the color of the crime is visible and often posted by the proud Black racist criminals themselves.
            Why do the national and most local media cover up the criminality of Black mobs?  On this question Flaherty is silent.  He clearly exposes the media cover-ups, but fails to ask why.
            To answer this question, an older book might be more helpful, William McGowan’s Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism.  Beginning with the large-scale Black riots in hundreds of American cities in the mid- to late-1960s, the liberal analysis of events was encapsulated in the report of the Kerner Commission.  Basically, the blue-ribbon panel blamed the riots on white racism, excused the rioters, and urged changes to prevent future outbreaks.  Universities, which became the think-tanks of the Left developed theories to exculpate Black violence; they were “culturally deprived,” they were victims of institutional racism, and their outbursts were simply a means to cope with such oppression.  Furthermore, Blacks could not, by definition, be racists.  They might show prejudice, but racism required power, and since Blacks in America lacked power, they were incapable of being racist.  Only white racism was the problem.  Of course, if you walk alone on a street at night, who has the power, a Black with a pistol, or you?  And in the era of President Obama and Attorney General Holder, who does have the power?  Moreover, if this definition made any sense and were applied elsewhere, then Afrikaners, by definition, can no longer be racists in the new South Africa.
            The Left-wing theories of race spun by academics were popularized by the media.  In the journalism and communications departments of universities, students were taught that as reporters they were to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.  Objective reporting was deemed not merely old fashioned, but immoral.  The reporter was to take the side of the oppressed.  And in race reporting, that meant coloring the news for the benefit of Blacks, who were by definition, the oppressed.  And so academe and the media melded into the academedia complex.
            Other issues were also fused with the new, politically correct mission of the communication majors.  For example, as the method of affirmative action became clearer in practice, (basically a way to give the job or scholarship to a lesser qualified or unqualified minority and deny it to the best qualified, if he were white.)  To justify these practices of denying equal opportunity to whites, the Left developed the theory of “white male privilege.”  According to this, all whites were privileged, and to create a level playing field, preferences had to be granted to minorities, even rich ones.  The whites who did not understand this justification, were clearly racists, and probably deserving of a Fanonesque tutoring session (i.e., violence).
            The curriculum of schools has changed drastically to incorporate many of the Leftist theories.  No longer is the West applauded as the center of a civilization that freed many men and women of drudgery, that provided light throughout the night, that sped people and goods across a continent on rail, and even in the air, - now the West is depicted as oppressive.  Whites smashing the wonderful civilizations of the Aztecs, of Africa, of wherever.  And white oppression must be fought.  Multiculturalism is the glorification of all cultures – except oppressive, colonial, racist, white culture.  The West became the enemy in many of America’s schools.
            So the “youths” who roam about lurking to beat whites (and sometimes Asians) are simply affirming what they have been taught in their multicultural curriculum and in the general media.  So, poor, raped, Tawana Brawley – persecuted and raped by the KKK policeman, for a year was a page-1 story for Rev. Al Sharpton to inform reporters about the evils of whites.  It was a hoax; but the Left did not care.  Think of all the educational material that Rev. Sharpton could present to the cameras during that year.  And poor, O. J. Simpson – that white bitch of a wife was receiving OJ’s alimony to squander on that Jewish waiter!  They surely deserved what happened to them – whoever might have killed them.  Another big racial even occurred in the Howard Beach section of New York City in which a Black was killed by autos as he fled a group of angry white youths.  Even a year following the event, there was a television movie about it to remind America of white racism and its murderous consequences.  Yet, at about the same time, in Milwaukee a white youth, fleeing a group of Black youths, jumped in Lake Michigan, and drowned.  There was no publicity about the death of Maldonado in Milwaukee.  Maldonado was just a white.  Instead of running to the lake, he should have simply let the Blacks beat the s___ out of him, and then he might still be alive.  The media and those who control it could not state blatantly the main difference between these stories.  One is a rare example of white racism; the other an all too common example of Black racism.  The media choose the spotlight the rare example, hoping to convince that it is the common type of racism.  The media also dismiss the more common type of racist attacks, because that would show Blacks in an unfavorable light.  The media rationally choose the stories that they will emphasize.  They choose those stories that fit their ideology.  So, they provide massive coverage to one story, and bury the other.
            Even though his mother was white, most people view Barack Obama is Black.  George Zimmerman had a Jewish father and an Hispanic mother.  But for the Leftist media, like CNN, Zimmerman was identified as the “white” who had brutally murdered the young Trayvon Martin.  The point of the Leftist media was to show a wicked white racist murdering an innocent young Black.  That story fit the Left-wing agenda.  Zimmerman resided in a neighborhood recently targeted by burglaries.  He was part of a neighborhood watch, seeking to keep his neighborhood safe.  However, the Left objects to that.  (To the Left, if you want to live in a safe neighborhood, get rich and live in a gated community.  The poor, according to the Left, should have to endure the crazies, the muggers, the rapists, and the Trayvon Martins.)  The Left vigorously opposes the 2nd Amendment and the right to own arms to defend oneself; one’s loved ones, one’s property.  Whatever happened in the confrontation between Zimmerman and Martin, the Left media sensationalized the event seeking to make it into a racist white killing an innocent Black.  I was not there to witness the event, and it is possible that Zimmerman shot Martin without provocation.  However, there are other possibilities.  Noteworthy, the Martin family has sought to keep Trayvon’s school records sealed.  He had been suspended for several days, and there were indications that he was involved with drugs and stolen property.  Is it not possible that Trayvon was casing the neighborhood when Zimmerman caught him?  But, young Blacks cannot be guilty when confronting a “white” (or even an Hispanic-white) according to the ideology that dominates the academedia complex.  Noteworthy also, when the New Black Panther Party called for the apprehension of Zimmerman, dead or alive, this threat did not stir the Department of Justice to protect Zimmerman.  After all, Obama marched beside leaders of the NBPP in Alabama and he also shared a platform with them.  Some members of the NBPP have called for the murder of all whites, men, women, and children.  If Obama could share a platform with them, and have his Attorney General Holder dismiss a lawsuit against the NBPP, why would his Administration object to that party’s threats against the Hispanic Zimmerman?
            If our media were doing their jobs properly, there would be no need for Flaherty’s book.  Because the media, on race issues, are dominated by Left-wing ideologues, they consciously try NOT to report stories unfavorable to Blacks.  When the story becomes too big to suppress, then the media spins it to distort, with the objective to make the Blacks appear in the most favorable light.
            What would happen if the media reported honestly?  The Left would have “the community” (Blacks and some radical whites) march on the station, organize boycotts of the sponsors’ products, gather signatures from academe and tax-exempt Leftist groups like the NAACP, the ACLU, for law suits, demand firings of the honest reporters, etc.  The station would quickly cave, and to prove its sincerity, it would grant a large contribution to some of the protesting organizations, fire the reporter or have him sent to an appropriate re-education center on sensitivity training.  The station would also promise that in the future no such honest reports would be aired.
            Sadly, since the 1960s, one cannot report the truth about race and crime in the major media in America.  Flaherty’s book is not published by a major publisher.  One can read about these incidents daily in some internet sites like Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance.  He includes clips about racial crime in the US, and in addition, racial conflict and crime in Sweden, the UK, the Netherlands, and other nations.
            Those old enough may recall black/white photographs from the 1930s of refugees fleeing Nazi Europe.  The pictures make one sympathize with the victims of the bullying, belligerence, and terror they endured in storm-troopered Europe.  With WWII won, America’s economy turned from building tanks to automobiles and consumer goods, and this nation embarked upon a period of great prosperity.  Some could now afford cars, and even new homes in the suburbs.  But others preferred to remain in the neighborhoods they knew from childhood.  They did not want to move to the green burbs; they preferred to stay near the church their parents had helped build, the one in which they had been confirmed, been married, etc.  Then came the riots of the late 1960s.  The threats, the shots, the burned cars, burned buildings, beatings.  The Blacks doing this did not wear fancy storm-trooper uniforms, but they were just as racist, just as threatening, just as brutal.  Now many more whites found it necessary to flee the city.  Like the Jews of Hitler’s Europe, they had to leave, sometimes quite quickly, out of fear.  They often suffered financial loss in the process of a fast relocation.  Yes, they went to the burbs, and often loved it; like the Jews who came to America and loved it.  But many of these whites were driven from their homes.  White flight was a reality.  While the academedia complex can only envision white racism, it was the brutality of Black racism that caused many to flee.  (Jack Cashill’s Sucker Punch: The Hard Left Hook that Dazed Ali and Killed King’s Dream describes how Black racism led to the collapse of his home neighborhood in Newark, NJ, in the late 1960s.)
            What were whites fleeing?  Black racism.  Black crime.  Black “culture” (loud, noisy music, vulgarity, shouting, arguments, hatred of whites, etc.  Why is there such crime?  Because liberal judges do not require Blacks to abide by the same rules required of whites.  If they commit crimes, their punishment will often be lighter.  A Black who attacks a white can get away with it.  So why not do it?  It will not make news.  It is deleted from the newspaper.  If it does make news, it will somehow be the white man’s fault.  The Black is exonerated.  OJ was declared not guilty and across the nation Black university students cheered.  (Stick it to whitey!)
            Also telling, shortly after being elected President, Ronald Reagan was shot and severely wounded by attempted assassin John Hinckley.  The crime occurred in Washington, D.C., a city overwhelmingly Black in population.  A jury was selected to hear the case – eleven Blacks and one white.  Rather than convict the attempted murderer, the jury found him not guilty due to insanity!  Do you think that jury would have reached a similar verdict had Hinckley attempted to assassinate Obama?
            Flaherty writes about the past two years, atrocity after atrocity.  So many attacks by Blacks against whites that it no longer seems a tragedy, but a Stalinist statistic.  What might the numbers be?  Though she includes all crimes and all races, Ann Coulter includes an important paragraph in her new book, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama - “Between 1960 and 1973, the number of FBI index crimes – which are serious offences such as murder, rape, robbery, arson, assault, kidnapping and burglary – nearly tripled from 2,019,600 offences a year to 5,891,924.  Hundreds of thousands of Americans had to die, be raped, or have their property destroyed or stolen because liberals had some neat new ideas about crime.”(p. 12-13)
            Happily, not all Blacks have taken up the war against whites.   Many Blacks prefer peace with white people.  But too often Blacks vote for the liberal politicians and judges who refuse to crack down on Black crime.  If they are jurors, they too often vote to let guilty Blacks go free.
            Recall Stalin emphasized how one can conceive of an individual death, but not the death of a million.  That is a statistic.  Yet, Flaherty’s endless recording of one after another attack on whites by Black racists has a more powerful impact.  The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  It is not a single incident, but the cumulative effect of reading about attacks on whites by Black racists.  Equally important, the equally cumulative effect of the consistent cover-ups and lies by the mass media and the government officials to hide or excuse the Black attacks.
            What has happened to America in recent decades is a tragedy.  In reality, the elite have encourage Blacks to make war on whites.  It is a war consciously ignored by the academedia complex.  It is a war encouraged and subsidized by the extremely wealthy foundations (most of which are dominated by the Left).  It is at present a one-sided war, for only one groups is involved in the aggression.  The other is victimized.  The media pretend there is no war.  The politicians appease the aggressors.  Statistics and tragedies.
            Despite the flaws of typographical errors, misspelt and omitted words, despite the lack of analysis and index, despite the sloppy look and oversized print, White Girl Bleed A Lot provides accurate description of the continuing race war that the mainstream media consciously refuse to report.        

Saturday, September 29, 2012

RE: BETTINA APTHEKER'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY


 INTIMATE POLITICS: HOW I GREW UP RED,
FOUGHT FOR FREE SPEECH, AND BECAME A FEMINIST REBEL
By BETTINA F. APTHEKER, (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2006)
                                          Rev. by Hugh Murray 
                     This is a provocative and honest autobiography.  Reading it closely, however, one can observe how ideology still shapes Bettina’s view of reality, distorting it to fit her leftist and feminist structure.
            When her book was first published in 2006, the media focused on her assertion that her father, Herbert Aptheker, for decades described as “the leading theoretician of the Communist Party, USA,” had sexually abused his daughter, Bettina, from age 3 to age 13.  Toward the end of her book, Bettina discussed this “nightmare” of abuse with her female lover, Kate, who like Bettina is also a feminist.  Upon hearing of some of Herbert’s reactions to these charges, Kate suggested that Herbert might have been molested as a child himself.  Bettina then writes, “I knew that my father had had an older brother named Alvin.  He and my father had been very close and they shared a room together as boys.  Alvin had committed suicide” when he was 28 and Herbert 20.(p. 513)
            I have no knowledge of Alvin or why he committed suicide at age 28.  But neither does Bettina.  And because some victims of child abuse later abuse children themselves is no reason to presume that Alvin molested Herbert – which she insinuates.  I submit that Bettina smears and convicts Alvin because of her ideology, not because of any verifiable facts.  Ironically, her family was a fierce opponent of “McCarthyism,” yet here we see her practicing a version of it more damaging than any conducted by the Wisconsin Senator.
            This paragraph’s meanness belies the declared aims of her autobiography: “…, I made the decision that I would write about particular individuals only from my direct experience with them, so that I would not engage in rumor or hearsay.”(5)  By including this smear against her uncle, Bettina weakens her allegations against her father.
 I must admit, I came to this book as a skeptic.  I suspected from the coverage of her “recovered” memory of fatherly abuse that it was all a feminist fantasy.  My Master’s thesis, completed in 1963, explored the Scottsboro rape cases of the 1930s, in which two white women alleged they had been raped on a freight train by nine Blacks.  The Communists defended the young men, agitating here and abroad, and hiring top-notch attorneys who proved – to almost everyone except Alabama juries – that the boys were innocent.  I am male, and totally reject the view enunciated by Nina Totenberg on National Public Radio during the Clarence Thomas hearings that women do not make up stories.  I was furious about the smear campaign against Thomas, and against the young nephew of Sen. Ted Kennedy, who was falsely accused by a woman in Florida after a night of partying.  I also had to endure the year-long hoax of charges invented by Tawana Brawley and supported by Rev. Al Sharpton & Co. and reported daily in the liberal media.  I questioned her veracity from the beginning, but the media dared not do so until much later.  And I was angry not only at the media, but the Duke University administrators who condemned the school’s lacrosse team as guilty the minute false charges were lodged.  All of these were examples of feminist injustice – smearing and destroying the reputations of men to reinforce the feminist ideology, and the feminist lie, - that women do not make up stories.
Though I am clearly opposed to the feminist approach, I do not go to the other extreme by maintaining that women always lie about charges of sexual harassment, abuse, and rape.  I consider each case individually, looking at the credibility of all those involved.  At present the media are quick to investigate the man’s background, searching for patterns or evidence of other indiscretions.  However, because of feminist inspired “rape-shield laws” the public is prevented from knowing the name and background of the woman, or even whether she has had a pattern of making false charges.  These feminist laws are unjust and should be repealed.
            As for Bettina’s father, Herbert, I also knew him personally, having met him at two lectures he presented in the summer of 1962, and  I worked for him on his W. E. B. Du Bois projects and at the American Institute for Marxist Studies from 1971 to 1975.  I was Aptheker’s employee and while relations with my boss were generally cordial, we were not close.  I was invited to his home on only one occasion, a small gathering that included (if I recall correctly) Herbert’s wife, Fay, another Du Bois researcher, Bettina, her husband Jack, and her child Josh.
            I was shocked by Bettina’s charge of molestation.  We have only her account of this; not his.  None of us was there to substantiate her charge.  The evidence supporting Bettina’s claim is circumstantial, so what follows is speculation.
            In the 1980s the Isa family, Palestinians living in St. Louis, Missouri, came under suspicion for possible terrorist connections.  The US Government placed a bug on their telephone.  Though the Feds were listening for possible terrorist activities, in 1989 they inadvertently found themselves recording sounds of the father and mother engaged in a Muslim “honor killing” of their 16-year-old daughter, Palestina.  The daughter, also a Muslim, had assimilated into America life, taking a job and dating someone of whom the family disapproved.  The family believed it had no alternative but to kill her.
            Was the Aptheker home similarly bugged?  Aptheker was an open and prominent member of the Communist Party.  If the home had been bugged, and if the Feds overheard Herbert and Bettina “playing” their secret game, then the FBI would have been in the position to blackmail Herbert Aptheker.  Bettina’s memoir gives no hint of any FBI bugging or blackmail.   So, either 1) the FBI had not installed such listening devices in their home, or 2) they did, but the molestation did not occur, or 3) it did occur, but the bugs did not detect the “games.”  Barring future discovery of some old Govt. recordings, there seems to be no hard evidence to prove Bettina’s charges.  We have simply her word.
            Yet, reading her autobiography, I reluctantly conclude that Bettina’s “recovered memory” is probably accurate, that Herbert probably did abuse her when she was a child.  I admired Herbert, and in many ways still do.  But I concede that her description of his reaction to her accusation when she finally confronted him, - this has the ring of truth.  Sadly, I now think Herbert probably did what she accuses him of.
            There is another item, a strange insertion in Bettina’s story that raises questions that she did not attempt to answer.  She asserts that her father went to Mexico to “find” a Mexican Communist who had betrayed American Communist leader Gus Hall to authorities, so that Hall would face prison in the US.(23)  Hall had fled from the US after being found guilty on an anti-Communist charge, and in Mexico he had been captured.  If the US Govt. was unaware that prominent Communist Herbert Aptheker was going in and out of Mexico illegally in 1951 at the height of the Cold War, then the Feds probably had no clue as to what was going on in the Aptheker household when Herbert “played train” with Bettina.  This would reinforce the notion that the FBI would have no hard evidence of molestation, even if it had occurred.  It makes her charge more plausible.  Not only does it make the charge of molestation more likely against Herbert, it raises other, even more serious questions about his trip to Mexico.  But again, for both alleged events, we have only her word.
            I noted earlier that Bettina’s leftist ideology distorts her view of reality.  Let me illustrate.  Doing research, Bettina and her mate Kate had visited the Chicago home of Mrs. Duster, the daughter of famed civil rights leader Ida B. Wells-Barnett.  “…Mrs. Duster gave Kate and me very careful instructions about which streets in the neighborhood were safe to walk and which were not.  With this she directed us to the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago…We set off and soon came upon the southern border of the university, which faced the ghetto.  Entrance to the campus from this side was impossible, as it was bordered by a huge wrought-iron gate, with spikes…and a literal moat such as one might expect…at a medieval castle.  I was too stunned even to speak; the racist message…was unbelievable.” (400)
Reading this, I concluded that what was unbelievable was Bettina’s denial of reality.  Mrs. Duster, daughter of a Progressive-era, civil-rights activist, Duster, who herself had been a social worker in Chicago, knew her neighborhood, and how unsafe it was.  Who made it unsafe?  Roaming bands of Ku Kluxers?  No, young Black males.  They were the violent criminals whom Mrs. Duster was directing Bettina to avoid.  They were the Huns of modern Chicago – so dangerous that an outpost of civilization, the city’s university, excavated a moat and installed a heavy gate to impede any invasion of the peaceful campus.  Without the moat there might have been no library to house the papers of Wells-Barnett.  With invasions of violent criminals, would the university have found it necessary to relocate to a safer area?  But Bettina can only see “racism.”  Has she really removed her red-tinted glasses she had inherited from her parents?
            When her parents lived in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, Fay was mugged twice, and Herbert was knocked to the ground by a thief who used a knife to cut open his pockets in search for valuables.  Herbert was in denial.  He told me it was all political.  Though one cannot preclude anti-communism as a possible motive, it is far more likely that the mugger had simply targeted a white.  Black racism is rampant, but to the left, which dominates the academedia complex, Black racism does not exist.  Black crime is ignored, or excused.  So the left cannot analyze the reality of big cities.  When I was living in Brooklyn, I resided one subway stop from the Apthekers, and I left the neighborhood after a mugger broke my jaw (which decades later still causes problems).  After their muggings, Fay and Herbert separated themselves from the violent criminals of Brooklyn – not by a moat away, but by a continent away, to California.  Could they even admit to themselves that Black racism and Black crime motivated them to flee their home?  Bettina evaluates the moat as “racist.”  How does she evaluate her parents escape from crime?  Is white flight a symptom of racism?  Or a survival technique – seeking to escape from a hostile environment infected with Black noise, Black aggression, Black bullying, Black crime, Black terror.  (I certainly do not mean that all Blacks do these things, but most vote for the pro-crime politicians that refuse to crack down on illegal activities, resulting in mounting crime in those areas, and crime causes more poverty.)
            Another example of how the leftist ideology distorts Bettina’s view of reality: “I heard white students scapegoating students of color, blaming them if their white friends had not been admitted to university.  I used this as an example, named it as a form of racism.  This lecture brought the white students up short…Only then, I saw, when we were out of denial about how pervasive racism is, could I teach the history and begin a fruitful dialogue.”(461)  In her view, the charge of racism closes debate and brings white students (or Blacks like Louisiana-born Ward Connerly) up short!  Clearly, Bettina did not want dialogue any more than did President Bill Clinton during his “Dialogue on Race.”  What both want is a monologue on race, rationalizing policies that in the name of civil rights and equal opportunity deny civil rights and equal opportunity to white men and others.  (This is not what the civil rights movement stood for when I sat-in at Woolworth’s lunch-counter in the first New Orleans sit-in in 1960.)
            One must wonder about Bettina’s university classes.  She wrote, “Teaching became a form of activism for me,…”(406)  She was helping to create the feminist studies’ curricula, not only for her classes, but for emerging, growing field.  “I created a teaching style that established boundaries of trust and respect…I think this was possible because of the feeling of unconditional love that welled up in me as each class began…Whether or not students agreed with me on any particular subject didn’t matter.  What mattered was offering then a space…to come to their own conclusions.  What mattered was that they learned to love themselves ‘regardless,’…”!? 459)  In a history class, one might (or might not) learn history; sociology class, sociology; engineering class, engineering.  In the feminist class, one learns to love oneself.  Are you kidding me?  Should one receive university credit for learning to love oneself?
            Despite my objections and criticism, I found this to be an enjoyable book.  For brevity I shall mention a few other points.  As a child she bemoaned the execution of the Rosenbergs, the “alleged” atomic spies.(21)  Alleged!  In 2012 Russian leader Vladimir Putin spoke thanking the Western atomic scientists who had delivered suit cases of secret files to the old USSR to help the Soviets develop the bomb.  Putin emphasized “suitcases full.”  Bettina whitewashes the Black Panther Party(221).  For a better description of that murderous organization, read Destructive Generation by David Horowitz.  Bettina praises Mario Savio’s commitment to the First Amendment(129) during the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, but omits his support of the suppression of free speech at U. C.  Berkeley  years later when the campus paper printed an editorial critical of affirmative action, and the left confiscated and destroyed all copies of the paper.  Free Speech Movement?  But only for the left.
            Some quibbles.  Bettina writes that her dad was homophobic and describes an incident where he insulted a long-haired man at a concert.  Yet, in all my dealings with him, he was usually cordial.  I worked for him for several years and do not recall him uttering a word demeaning to gays.  However, around early 1975 I brought the subject up when I submitted to him a possible introduction to a collection of his articles.  In the introduction I criticized Herbert on several issues, including his silence about gay oppression.  He blew up, shouting at me as never before.  He screamed at me that he was leading the fight inside the Communist Party to change its position to make it more tolerant of gays.  As I was not a member of the Party, I had no way of judging the veracity of his claim – which was made in anger.  In September 2012 I emailed Bettina, our first contact in about four decades.  I asked her about this specifically.  She graciously replied to me, writing that she has uncovered nothing in her research on gays and the CP to substantiate her father’s assertion to me about his efforts to liberalize the CP stance on gays.  When Herbert returned my introduction in 1975 in that heated encounter, he did not fire me on the spot.  Yet, I felt the atmosphere had changed, and began to search for other work.
            Bettina mentions that her grandfather was a major founder of one of the oldest synagogues in Brooklyn (426), but she omits that he acquired a building on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and 28th Street – a building he got around 1928 and lost after the market crash of 1929.  She is good in describing how as an only child, she was like a 3rd adult in the family.(34)  I had a similar experience as an only child.  She blames the fall of Communist East Germany on corruption; I blame its demise on socialism.  Indeed, without the presence of Soviet troops, it would have fallen long before 1991.
Her autobiography should have had an index, but that is a minor point.
            What is good about her book?  She presents an inside view of the Free Speech Movement protests in California, which would have repercussions by allowing the left to be heard on numerous campuses throughout the nation.  She is good at showing the struggles by a lesbian to conform to her parents’ religion (Communism), and how, in the end, she could no longer live a lie with her husband.  Her lesbian feelings were a major chink in the armor of Communism, one that allowed her to free herself from some of that heavy, rigid ideology.  It was not easy, and she writes of her problems with paranoia, self-loathing, and depression – problems I too have experienced as a gay man.  Once freed from the red armor, she was lucky to find a lesbian partner, Kate, and if they did not live “happily ever after,” at least they lived together happily.  Her chapter on the death of her parents is moving.  The confrontation with her father, Herbert, about the abuse, is wrenching.  Her description of driving on a bridge in California just as an earthquake rumbled beneath her provides a depth absent from the 20 seconds of TV images shown during such natural calamities.
            Her narrative of her conversion to Buddhism is interesting but left me cold.  One tenet of the religion is enough to close my mind on the issue – thou shall not kill insects.  As one who grew up in New Orleans swatting mosquitoes, crunching cockroaches, and using matches to burn ants, I utterly reject the ideal of not killing vermin.  When my Hindu friends gently remove a bug from a table, I roll my eyes.  I, too, wear my own set of blinders.
            As much as I disagree with Bettina’s politics, I enjoyed reliving her era – for it is mine as well.  We fought some of the same battles, yet arrived at different destinations.  Yet, I suspect we are both a bit more tolerant now than we were decades ago.  That she would even answer my emails, knowing that I’m now a conservative, attests to her tolerance.  Overall, Bettina’s book is an honest work about iconic figures of the left; one notes her courage in various movements, her struggles within her immediate family, and her wider family (the Party).  Finally she emerged as a lesbian mother and an academic for feminism and the left.  One need not agree with her to learn from her.  Bettina’s story covers not only the Berkeley protests, but some of the changes in the US, and the flexibility within the American system that contrasts with the rigidity of the Communist Party.  Hers is a volume that tells volumes.
            Addition, 10 March 2015.  Bottom line – Bettina’s autobiography raises two disturbing charges against her father, Herbert Aptheker: 1) Did he molest her?  2) Was he a hit man (not just a philosophical debater) for the Communist movement?  Do Federal Agencies have any tapes or information related to either of these charges?